How to Book Performers for Your Event: Finding Acts, Making the Offer, Contracts and Advancing the Show

The lineup is the product. It sells the tickets, anchors the sponsorship deck and decides what the audience remembers, and it is also where an event's money and its show-day chaos most often go wrong. This sixth and final article in the How to Run Profitable Events series is a guide to how to book performers for your event: where to find acts, how to write an offer that gets answered, what a performer contract must cover, and how to advance the show so set times, riders and payments are settled before load-in. Contract terms are general guidance, not legal advice; have a lawyer review your template once.

Key takeaways

• Book to a purpose: each slot on the lineup should do a job, from selling tickets to filling the afternoon to giving a local act its first big stage, and the budget should follow the job.
• Acts answer offers that are complete: date, slot, set length, fee, what is covered, tech provided and a reply-by date. Vague enquiries sit in inboxes.
• The contract is where cancellations, riders, set lengths, merch and recording rights are settled; sign it electronically before you announce, not after.
• Advancing is a process, not a phone call: stage plots, input lists, set times, hospitality and payment details collected and confirmed weeks out.
• Every performer should be able to see their own stage, set time and load-in details without emailing you, and the schedule should refuse to double-book anyone.

Set the lineup goals and the budget

Before a single enquiry, answer three questions:

• What must the lineup do? Sell tickets (a headliner with a draw), keep people on site (a strong mid-card and no dead hours), build the event's identity (a genre, a community, a region), and serve sponsors (a family-friendly afternoon, a marquee name for the presenting sponsor).
• What can it cost? A common split for a festival is roughly half the artist budget on the headliners, a third on the mid-card and the rest on local and emerging acts, but a community event or a competition showcase may invert that. Include travel, accommodation, hospitality, backline and the production each act needs; a fee is never the whole cost.
• What does the audience want? Last year's post-event survey, the registration questions you asked at checkout and your ticket sales by day tell you which acts moved tickets; book toward what worked.

Where to find performers

• The local scene: venues, promoters, open mics, dance schools, community arts organizations and the acts already selling out rooms in your city. Local acts draw local tickets and cost the least to move.
• Booking agents: for touring artists, the agent is the door; agencies publish rosters and territories, and a regional agent will pitch you acts routing through your area on the dates you have.
• Other festivals and competitions: lineups from comparable events in your region are a curated shortlist, and acts that played nearby last year are often routing again.
• Streaming and social platforms: Bandcamp, Spotify's regional charts, Instagram and TikTok show who is growing and whose audience matches yours; follower counts in your city matter more than global ones.
• Schools, studios and companies: for dance, theatre and performance events, studios and companies bring performers and their own audience, which is the model most competitions and showcases run on.
• Your own submissions: an artist-submission form on your site, with a deadline and the slots available, builds a pipeline and a mailing list.

Keep a shortlist with each act's draw in your market, their typical fee range, their agent or contact, their availability and which slot they suit.

Make an offer that gets answered

Agents and artists answer complete offers and ignore enquiries. A one-page offer includes:

• Event name, date, city and venue, with expected attendance and last year's numbers.
• The slot: stage, set time, set length and changeover.
• The fee and currency, and whether it is a guarantee, a guarantee plus a percentage of door, or a door split.
• What you cover: travel, accommodation, ground transport, meals and hospitality, backline and production.
• Billing position on marketing.
• Payment terms: deposit on signing, balance on the day or on completion.
• Any exclusivity radius or dates you need.
• A reply-by date.

Expect to negotiate on fee, billing, the rider and the exclusivity window. Hold firm on set length and changeover, because the schedule depends on them, and on the payment schedule, because your cash flow does.

What the performer contract must cover

A performance agreement is short, and every clause exists because something once went wrong without it:

• Parties, event, date, venue, stage and set time (with the right to move the set time within a window).
• Fee and payment schedule: the deposit on signing, the balance and when, the method, and any door-split calculation.
• Cancellation: by the artist (deposit returned, replacement obligations), by the organizer (what is owed at each stage), and the weather and force majeure clause for outdoor events.
• Set length and start time, overrun rules, and the noise-permit cut-off.
• Technical rider: what you provide (PA, monitors, backline, lighting, crew) and what they bring; attach the stage plot and input list.
• Hospitality rider: meals, dressing room, drinks, guest-list allocation, and a cap on what is reasonable.
• Travel and accommodation: who books, who pays, and the arrival deadline.
• Merchandise: who sells, the split, and the seller fee if any.
• Recording, photography and streaming rights: whether you can record, stream or use footage in marketing, and whether the artist can.
• Marketing obligations: announcement date, use of name and likeness, the artist's social posts.
• Insurance and conduct: liability, damage to equipment, and behaviour on site.
• Exclusivity radius in time and distance.
• Governing law and signatures.

Sign before you announce. A lineup announced before the contract is signed is a negotiation you have already lost. Signing should be electronic and per role: in Eventist, each role in the event (headliner, supporting act, DJ, MC, judge, workshop leader) has its own contract document, performers are assigned to a role and sign from their own dashboard, and the organizer sees at a glance who has signed and who has not before the announcement goes out.

Advance the show

Advancing turns a signed act into a set that starts on time. Four to six weeks out, for every act:

• Collect the stage plot, input list, backline needs, set list length and any changes since the rider.
• Confirm arrival time, load-in window, soundcheck slot, set time, changeover, dressing room, hospitality and guest list.
• Settle payment details for the balance and the merch arrangement.
• Share the run-of-show, the site map with the artist entrance, parking and the stage, and the stage manager's contact.

Build the schedule with the set lengths and changeovers from the contracts, and check it for conflicts: the same act on two stages, an artist landing after their set, a shared drummer in back-to-back slots. In Eventist, the multi-stage schedule flags a performer booked in two places at once, the AI schedule builder drafts the day from set lengths, and each performer's dashboard shows their own stage, set time and load-in details along with the documents you share, so the "what time am I on?" email stops arriving. Setlists and music files upload to the same place, which matters for competitions and DJ-driven events where the sound engineer needs every track before the day.

Show day

• A stage manager per stage who owns the clock, with a printed or on-phone run-of-show and the authority to hold the schedule.
• Artist check-in at a single point with credentials, hospitality and the map.
• Balances paid as agreed, with the receipt in the same place as the contract.
• The crew on a read-only run-of-show so the person calling the next act does not need a laptop; Eventist's run-of-show portal does this for every stage, and it updates when a set moves.

After the show

Pay on time, send the photos and the numbers (attendance at their set, if you have it, is the thing artists and agents most want), ask for a quote for next year's deck, and note who was easy to work with. The acts that were good to work with are your first calls next year, and the agents who were paid on time answer the next offer.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find performers for my event?

Start with the local scene (venues, promoters, dance studios, community arts groups), then booking agents for touring acts, lineups from comparable events in your region, streaming and social platforms for acts growing in your city, and an artist-submission form on your own site. Keep a shortlist with each act's draw, fee range and contact.

What should I include in an offer to a performer?

Date, city, venue and expected attendance; the stage, set time, set length and changeover; the fee, currency and structure; what you cover in travel, accommodation, hospitality and production; billing position; payment terms; any exclusivity; and a reply-by date. Complete offers get answered.

What should a performer contract include?

The parties, date, stage and set time; the fee and payment schedule; cancellation and force majeure terms; set length and overrun rules; technical and hospitality riders; travel and accommodation; merchandise splits; recording and photography rights; marketing obligations; insurance and conduct; exclusivity; governing law and signatures. This is general guidance, not legal advice.

How much should I pay performers?

It depends entirely on draw, market and slot. A useful rule is to size each fee to the tickets that act will sell for you and the job the slot does, split the artist budget between headliners, mid-card and local acts, and add travel, hospitality and production to every fee before you compare offers.

How do I manage performer contracts and schedules?

Use per-role contract templates signed electronically before the announcement, collect stage plots and input lists during advancing, build the schedule from contracted set lengths with conflict checks, and give each performer their own view of their stage, time and load-in details. Eventist handles per-role e-signed contracts, performer dashboards, setlist and music uploads, conflict-checked multi-stage scheduling and a crew run-of-show in one place.

The series

This is part six of How to Run Profitable Events. The rest of the series: grants and funding, vendors and sponsorship packages, setting up your own AV, hiring event security and event permits. For the platform side, see festival ticketing software and the concert ticketing platform.